A few of what I’m sure will not be my final thoughts on the decision to abolish the Indian as the logo for Turners Falls High School:
One of the more unusual aspects of this process was the relative silence of Gill-Montague School Superintendent Michael Sullivan. Ordinarily, the impetus for this type of change comes from the superintendent, as we saw a few years back when Frontier Regional School did away with the Redskin logo.
But Sullivan was quiet as a church mouse on the matter until the night of the Feb. 14 vote, when he broke his silence and made it clear that he viewed this as a “civil rights issue” which would only worsen if the logo were retained.
I know a lot of people believe that the decision to remove the logo had been made in the minds of the majority of that committee’s members long before the vote was taken. But Sullivan’s statement, politically speaking, was the closeout.
Ever since the advent of education reform, the bulk of the power for running school districts has been in the hands of the superintendent, both statutorily and politically. It takes a lot for a school committee to defy a superintendent, and when Sullivan finally decided to go public with his assessment, his board didn’t have a whole lot of choice but to go along.
Though the policy may be decided, the political fallout from the Indian vote will likely be felt for some time. As far as I know, there will still be a non-binding vote in Montague, and there is a push to get it on the ballot in Gill. The supporters of saving the logo are requesting all of the School Committee’s email and other correspondence related to the process, and there is even apparently an effort by logo opponents to try to recall the Montague Selectboard for committing the unpardonable sin of putting the logo question on the ballot — despite making it clear that they did so only to save the town clerk and her assistant two days work certifying signatures on a referendum petition everyone knew was coming in the first place.
All this, and we still don’t have a replacement logo, sending the Turners boys and girls basketball teams into the post-season with no clear identifying symbol, while the powers-that-be work to find the money needed to remove all remnants of the Indian from the school’s uniforms before the next sports season.
There are clearly a lot of Democrats pretty freaked by what they are seeing from the Trump administration, but perhaps nowhere more so than in the hallowed halls of the Massachusetts General Court.
So nervous are House Democrats that they actually held a caucus this past week to talk about how to respond to a series of Trump executive orders, especially ones related to immigration and the elimination of certain regulatory mechanisms.
“The discussion focused on whether we should issue a resolution opposing some of these orders, or actually draft actual legislation in response,” 2nd Berkshire State Rep. Paul Mark said.
Mark said lawmakers are also trying to gauge how certain policy changes could impact the commonwealth financially, especially in the area of education funding.
“There’s just no way to really know how some of this stuff will affect us,” Mark said. “When you hear talk, for example, about the idea of eliminating the federal Department of Education, we have to start looking at how it affects our bottom line.”
“If we end up having to back-fill some of those cuts, if they materialize, that just leaves us that much less money to pay for other much-needed programs, Mark added.
I guess it’s time for those guys to start earning that big raise they voted themselves earlier this year.
A number of people are not happy about the idea of security cameras on the Greenfield Town Common, and some of them happen to sit on the Town Council.
Said opposition was not enough to prevent that body from asking the mayor to install those cameras, which some feel will violate the free speech rights of those who choose to demonstrate there.
Taking that concern into account, there is nothing stopping the council from passing an ordinance regulating how and when those cameras can be used. That way, no one gets their rights violated, and the “Keeping Christ in Christmas” people can put their crèche up each year without fear of vandalism.
It’s what those of us in the real world like to call a “compromise,” a word that seems to have largely disappeared from the vocabulary of certain politicians, which is a big reason why this country is in the mess it is when it comes to public discourse.